Nick Epstein
My prediction: Braze won’t be the last platform to get snapped up in the next few years.
I’ve spent my whole career in MarTech. Years on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe, Hubspot, you name it, i've used it, then Braze since 2018, including leading the Deloitte practice that grew into the biggest Braze team in the region. Today Terry Mefsut and I run Composed Digital, APAC’s most awarded Braze practice where we've built software products on Salesforce that make the two platforms work together. Check them out here.
A lot of people are suggesting Salesforce ownership will materially change the value customers get from Braze. I disagree. Look back to 2013, when Salesforce bought ExactTarget for US$2.5 billion. After far too many name changes it’s now Marketing Cloud Engagement. Since the acquisition the product has become many times more capable, and to this day I know plenty of companies running Marketing Cloud with success without Salesforce CRM or any other Salesforce product in their stack. Though they could do more, with less effort if they switch to Braze. 😁
In the near term, I don’t think much will change about Braze at all. The Co-Founder Bill Magnuson is staying as CEO, the roadmap is still set by an exceptional product team and the 150 new or enhanced features, all focused on making the platform easier to use and to market with at scale, will still launch over the next year. There’ll be plenty more announced over the coming years improving the product for marketers, and I’d expect better integrations with Salesforce, Slack and Data Cloud to be among them. On pricing, Braze is already on a usage-based model, not dissimilar to Salesforce and most other players in the market, I don't expect much change there either.
Braze has been the leader in marketing automation for a number of years. We believe that so strongly that Braze is the only marketing automation platform we support at Composed, alongside a range of warehouse, CDP and loyalty platforms.
I think there are three core reasons Braze dominates, and why it will keep doing so under Salesforce. They’re also why I don’t think Braze will follow the same path as Marketing Cloud, which grew more capable under Salesforce but became harder to use as marketers’ needs and the tech around them shifted.
#1 Architecture
Braze was founded in 2011, which gave the team a real advantage over older players because the technology available had moved on so quickly. Braze was event-first and composable from the start. It’s in their DNA, and that architecture has paid off for well over a decade, they started in mobile and now support over 10 channels, though the user experience as a marketer to craft experiences is easier than it was back in the early days despite massive capability growth.
Marketing Cloud took a different path. ExactTarget built its own email, SMS and push before Salesforce bought it, but much of the wider suite was acquired and bolted on:
- Social listening and publishing: Radian6 (2011) and Buddy Media (2012), later merged into Social Studio
- Web recommendations and personalisation: iGoDigital (bought by ExactTarget in 2012), then Evergage (2020), which became Interaction Studio and is now Marketing Cloud Personalization
- Advertising audiences: Krux (2016), which became Salesforce DMP
- Marketing analytics: Datorama (2018), now Marketing Cloud Intelligence (My least favourite product they have)
Each came with its own interface, data model and infrastructure, and they were never fully integrated. Marketing Cloud is a massively capable platform, but because so much of it was bolted on, it became genuinely difficult to use for marketers and even for developers. Different tools for different channels, data that has to be moved between them, three contact models that could be tied together with a lot of work and a lot of knowing which bit of the platform does what.
Braze doesn’t have that problem, because it was built as one platform from the ground up. Every channel runs off the same user profile and the same real-time event data, so when a customer does something in your app, website or real life, that signal is available to every channel straight away. Segments, personalisation and journeys work the same way whether you’re sending an email, a push, an SMS or an in-app message, and you build them all in one place. When Braze adds a new channel or capability, it’s engineered into that same core rather than sitting alongside it. For a marketer, that means learning one way of working. For a developer, it means one integration and one data model, not five.
#2 Focus
Since day one, Braze’s product team has been laser focused on one thing: marketing automation. They didn’t try to be all things to all companies like some competitors. The mission has always been helping marketers be better marketers, or as we like to say at Composed, turning single channel marketers into multi-channel marketers overnight.
#3 Composability and the agentic future
The next wave of marketing will be agents working across your whole stack, and that only works if the platform at the centre plays nicely with everything around it. That’s the same composable architecture from #1 paying off again. Braze isn’t tied to a single AI provider. Agents built in BrazeAI Agent Console can run on models from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, and with Operator Connect, marketers can work with BrazeAI Operator directly from tools like Claude and ChatGPT. At Composed we’re already using Braze Conversational Agents to integrate with platforms including Salesforce, Zendesk and HubSpot. I don’t see Salesforce ownership changing that. We only see the ecosystem growing stronger and more capable.
So no, I don’t think this is the end of Braze as we know it. If you’re a Braze customer reading the headlines and wondering what this means for you, my honest take is not much. The product, the roadmap and the team are all still there, and the reasons you chose Braze haven’t changed.
If anything, Salesforce buying a platform built this way says a lot about where the market is heading. So here’s my prediction: Braze won’t be the last platform to get snapped up in the next few years.